Brown: The Last Discovery of America Read Online Free Page B

performed the songs of Porter and Coward and such with a perfect mid-Atlantic pronunciation, which is to say, without a trace of melanin in her voice. This was not ventriloquism or minstrelsy or parody—I was disappointed to learn it wasn’t—but the voice was authentic to Mercer because she had been educated by British nuns who insisted upon public-school elocution. Another cabaret singer of that time, Anita O’Day, quoted in a book I can’t find, described Mabel Mercer thus: “That chick has the weirdest fucking act in show business.”
    I would like my act to be as weird. An old brown man walking the beach, singing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I have, throughout my writing life, pondered what a brown voice should sound like.
    I have pondered what a black voice should sound like.
    On September 16, 1966—contemporary newspaper accounts reported a cool evening—the new Metropolitan Opera House opened in New York City. President Johnson and Mrs. Johnson were in attendance, as were President and Mrs. Marcos of the Philippines, as was U Thant, Secretary-General of the United Nations. The opera house, designed by Wallace K. Harrison, was a modernist pavilion with an arched façade, retractable chandeliers, murals by Marc Chagall.
    The opera commissioned for the opening was Antony and Cleopatra by American composer Samuel Barber. Leontyne Price sang the role of Cleopatra. The Franco Zeffirelli production fused disparate motifs of colonial adventure in the manner of a seventeenth-century print. Zeffirelli’s Egyptians were Elizabethan-Floridian. Leontyne Price wore an enormous feathered, beribboned headdress reminiscent of Amazonia, and a gown of Renaissance cut. She was costumed to appear bare-breasted, a caryatid of continental allegory—at once the African and the Indian of Alexis de Tocqueville’s notice. At least that is how I remember the photograph of Leontyne Price in Time magazine; that is the image that comes to mind as I reread de Tocqueville.
    You are probably too young to remember or perhaps you have forgotten what a pride for America that evening was—the most modern opera house in the world to prolong the heartbeat of the nineteenth century, and with Leontyne Price, the reigning dramatic soprano of her day, enshrined at the center. And yet, the Metropolitan Opera seemed at that moment—eight o’clock, September 16, 1966—to mark the very crossroads of American history, the division of the old era and the new. Leontyne Price seemed the apotheosis of African America, of new America, as if uncountable degradations inflicted upon African Americans might be ransomed by a single, soaring human voice.
    That same year, 1966, there were thirty-eight race riots in American cities. And thirty-five years later, Lincoln Center looks irrelevant; there is talk in the papers about pulling it down.
    That same year, 1966, I was in college. I typed, on erasable onionskin paper: “White southern writers had earlier preoccupied themselves with the deconstruction of the South along Grecian lines, a lament for pride brought low and a contrition for the sins of the Fathers, all the while insisting upon kinship—the black maid’s sigh, the white child’s ‘Why?’ ”
     
    Black maid’s sigh? White child’s Why?
     
    My forehead began to pain me remarkably, to throb; a sort of mockery seized upon my temples, then billowed from my ears, like black smoke from a stovepipe. A figment stood before me:
    Naw.
    Listen, Hiawatha, honey, sittin by yo heatah,
Cradlin’ little ninny books, playin’ Little Eva—
Doodah mantchuns fulla haunted crackahs,
Long-face mens pullin’ sacks a ’baccas,
Clean white aprons wid dese fairytale patchas!
The sky is the skin o’ yo eye, Hiawatha!
Peel that skin off yo eye!
    The figment was clothed with a red calico shirt and a voluminous apron with many pockets and colored patches sewn on, like the patches on jerkins and pinafores in a child’s picture book. It wore a sort